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Established in 1960, Domino’s Pizza is one of the most recognized pizza delivery companies in the world with a network of nearly 11,000 company-owned and franchise-owned stores in the United States (hosting 4,986 of them) and 70 other countries, delivering more than 1 million pizzas a day worldwide. Over the past few years, those pizzas have been delivered in increasingly better-looking boxes with elaborate illustration and typographic schemes that have gone beyond the early days when the boxes sported nothing more than the Domino’s Pizza logo. Since 2008, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) has been their agency of record and have shepherded Domino’s through an evolution in good design — you might remember 2012’s sexy, black Handmade Pan Pizza box — bringing us to the project at hand: Pizza Press™, a custom type family commissioned by CP+B and designed by Monotype Studio.

— Function as a series of modular fonts that could be layered in various ways to add flexibility, variety and excitement to Domino’s brand voice

— Latin character set that used capitals only

— Function across a range of sizes and environments including packaging, web and broadcast

— Weights that could be used reasonably for smaller headlines and text

— Pair well with the existing Trade Gothic typeface family in use

Design brief

Intro to Pizza Press™.

Collaborating closely with the CPB team, Terrance Weinzierl of the Monotype Studio designed the Pizza Press™ typeface.

Based on a 19th century model, in the American Gothic tradition, the condensed typeface was spaced loosely so the shadow weights would not overlap.

Weinzierl designed optical variants of the ‘Antique’ stripped weights — a regular and a display—to function well in a range of sizes and environments.

The typeface is currently in use across Domino’s packaging, advertisements, broadcast, websites, apps, and POS across North America and Europe.

Solution

The type family available in Regular, Inline, Fill, Outline, Shadow, Antique, Antique display, and ornaments.

This is not our typical before/after post or even a new identity post. The logo hasn’t changed and even the identity itself isn’t much different from what we’ve been seeing out of Domino’s in the past couple of years. This type family, however, represents a fantastic new tool to help Domino’s deliver (pun!) its brand and visual identity in a consistent and easy-to-use manner across the world. By taking the guesswork out of how many lines in the shadow or what kind of ornaments to use or how thick should the inline be, it’s all baked (pun!) into a single, stackable type family that any franchiser, employee, or vendor can easily use. It also helps that the resulting letterforms are quite handsome and exude a tasty Americana feel that makes those million of boxes look more appetizing.

Keyboard map for ornaments.

Creation and utilization of the Pizza Press font has permitted Domino’s to simplify and reduce branding and marketing costs for its franchisees and international markets.

CPB is very pleased with the font. It changed what was a very time and labor intensive process—manually copying and pasting outlined vector art to layout—into a task as simple as typing on a keyboard, literally!

Jake Harvey, Digital Asset Manager, Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Praise as type specimen.Type specimens.Pizza boxes.

We don’t tend to think of Domino’s as purveyors of high-end design (or pizza for that matter) but their recent efforts, and this type family in particular, are remarkably outstanding for a company of this size, specially considering that it’s 96% franchise-owned, and each owner has to be empowered and is independently responsible to keep the brand on track. We also have to consider that ad agencies have never been well regarded among the graphic design industry for their typographic abilities — to spell it between the lines: they suck at it — so having this comprehensive and really nice type system in place helps Domino’s at every step of the way to have a consistent application that is above and beyond what’s expected from them. Now, somebody please tell me that there is a secret glyph with the Noid on it.

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New Custom Type Family for Domino's Pizza by Monotype Studio

Established in 1960, Domino's Pizza is one of the most recognized pizza delivery companies in the world with a network of nearly 11,000 company-owned and franchise-owned stores in the United States (hosting 4,986 of them) and 70 other countries, delivering more than 1 million pizzas a day worldwide. Over the past few years, those pizzas have been delivered in increasingly better-looking boxes with elaborate illustration and typographic schemes that have gone beyond the early days when the boxes sported nothing more than the Domino's Pizza logo. Since 2008, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) has been their agency of record and have shepherded Domino's through an evolution in good design — you might remember 2012's sexy, black Handmade Pan Pizza box — bringing us to the project at hand: Pizza Press™, a custom type family commissioned by CP+B and designed by Monotype Studio.